Westwood lawyer to head Massachusetts Bar Association

WESTWOOD - David White's new position will allow him to influence lawyers and improve the judicial system across the state.

By Greg Duggan

David White's new position will allow him to influence lawyers and improve the judicial system across the state.

On Saturday, the Gay Street resident takes over as president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, a nonprofit organization that provides benefits to member attorneys and advocates for professional excellence and betterment of the judicial system.

A civil litigator and principal with the Boston firm of Breakstone, White & Gluck PC, White specializes in personal injury, insurance company bad faith, medical malpractice and professional liability litigation.

"I've been an active member (of the Massachusetts Bar) for 15 years. This is the crowning achievement of my volunteerism there to be serving as president," White said last week.

Under his tenure, White wants the bar to continue focusing on improving criminal sentencing and civil practice, which deals with jury trials. He also wants to introduce more environmentalism to the field of law.

To better criminal sentencing practices, White said the Massachusetts Bar hopes to work with Gov. Deval Patrick, Attorney General Martha Coakley and the state Legislature. Goals include eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and restoring money for drug rehab and mental counseling for inmates, as well as offering more supervised parole programs.

"The system is broken. It costs too much, it's not reducing crime and not rehabilitating criminals effectively," White said.

For jury trials, White said the bar pushes for unbiased juries by urging judges to spend more time questioning potential jurors. Another effort is to educate the public and editorial writers about the sentencing process, for which White said judges often suffer unfair criticism.

On the environmental side, White said he has appointed an energy and environmental task force to develop and publish guidelines for energy conservation, with the aim of making lawyers environmental leaders in the state's business community.

The attorney's interest in the environment extends back three decades. After graduating from the University of Vermont in 1978 with a degree in environmental studies, White worked for a public interest research group in Vermont. The position opened his eyes to the role of attorneys in advocating for the environment, and he decided to pursue a degree and career in environmental law.

"There weren't many jobs in the field, and none in New England when I graduated (Northeastern University) in 1984," White said, so he took a job with a firm specializing in personal injury litigation.

Still, his passion for the environment persisted, and in the late 1990s White served on Westwood's Organization for Preservation of the Environment and Nature, or OPEN, Committee. He later founded and served as the first president of the Westwood Land Trust, which has helped preserve hundreds of acres in Westwood.

"He's just a smart guy," Anne Cadigan, a Land Trust member and former president, said of White. "He tends to be able to see strategies to confront a problem. I think his legal grounding gave him legal strategies for protecting land that he really used creatively."

White also serves the town as a sewer commissioner.

"To the extent he can help advocate politically or (by) fundraising, or serve on a board in town, he's always trying to do those sorts of things," said Land Trust president and fellow lawyer Nancy Dempze.

Formerly David White-Lief, the lawyer dropped the Lief after a divorce.